India and Russia deepen advanced technological collaboration

During the Cold War years, India was leaning towards the Soviet Camp, not only because the Capitalist bloc patronised Pakistan as a counterweight to India but also due to relative congruence between New Delhi’s and Moscow’s geopolitical and socio-economic objectives.

After her independence, India entered into collaboration with the Soviet Union for the procurement of military hardware. She was not a military power nor did she possess the technology to produce modern weaponry. Therefore, she depended on imports of materiel though her weak financial position limited her options. Therefore, India increasingly depended on military hardware supplied by Russia. It was only at a later stage that Moscow transferred some of the vital technologies to help India produce weapons indigenously and thereby save valuable foreign exchange.

India has taken big steps towards the Indigenous production of a variety of military hardware, particularly since the NDA government embarked on the atmanirbhar programme when it came to power in 2014. It provided the necessary resources for enhancing military capacity and output, for which much credit should go to the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO).

The imperative of self-sufficiency dawned upon our defence ministry after the disastrous short war with China in 1962. It exposed the vulnerability of our armed forces and Prime Minister Nehru’s reluctance to provide the requisite funds and logistics to the defence forces was shown to be unrealistic.

The continued threats to India’s borders in the east and the west, the unpredictable posture of China and unending infiltrations by armed jihadists from the western border of J&K became the catalyst for the NDA government to bring about a revolution of sorts for improving the quality and increasing the supplies of hardware for all the three wings of the armed forces as well as the auxiliary forces and the police force. 

Today, India is exporting a variety of weapons and military hardware, not only to Asian and African countries but also to some ‘Western’ states in the west. The DRDO has a programme for upgrading weapons in the three services and has grown into a very large organisation as foreign exchange has begun to flow in.

A recent report in Bloomberg Business News revealed that India has become the second-largest supplier of restricted technologies to Russia. The report says that “India has increased its shipment of critical restricted technologies to Russia which are prohibited under Western sanctions.” The paper states that India is now the second largest technology exporter to Russia after China. 

The sanctioning countries concede that it is difficult to enforce sanctions against Russia. Some of the functionaries even say that imposing sanctions on Russia is a futile exercise. They aim to weaken Russia and force Moscow to end the war with Ukraine but that has failed.

The US and some of its European allies accused India of buying large quantities of oil from Russia at a reduced price and in Indian rupees. Russia has stockpiled Indian rupees and Moscow uses it for replenishing its arsenal. However, India exposed the hypocrisy of America’s European allies by pointing out that they are buying Russian gas in far larger quantities. It was in this context that the Indian Minister of External Affairs had said that “Europe thinks its problem is the world’s problem but the world’s problem is not Europe’s problem.”

Western media claims that India has exported various goods like microchips and machine tools, to the tune of $ 60 million in April–May, roughly double the previous months. Undisclosed sources say that this figure has gone up to $ 95 million in July. The largest supplier of sanctioned goods to Russia is China and India comes second.

Referring to Western officials, Bloomberg’s other sensational disclosure is that nearly one-fifth of ‘prohibited’ (by US-EU sanctions) technologies enter Russia’s military-industrial complex through India. 

The intriguing question is how Russia circumvents the Western sanctions on dual-use goods. Russia buys these goods from third countries, through subsidiaries of MNCs or a network of intermediaries.

According to Bloomberg, the United Arab Emirates and Turkiye were earlier two major transit points but after a change in  Russia’s strategy, India, Malaysia, and Thailand are the new transit points. Western media is trying to project India’s supply of crucial technologies as a major threat to the EU and the US. This is intended to create a wedge between India and friendly countries in the West. It is also an implicit warning to India that its defiance of sanctions against Russia can be an impediment to the improvement of its relations with the US-led Bloc. Representatives of the NATO member-countries have been visiting India to put pressure on Indian authorities to halt the sales to Russia. 

Some analysts think that the US could consider imposing harsher penalties on India. For example, the US Deputy Secretary of Treasury Wally Adeyemo did hint to some members of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) that they incur the risk of falling under US sanctions.

Most commentators however believe that, notwithstanding the issuance of direct and indirect threats, the US will not rush to act in the final weeks of Biden’s presidency because India is a priority country for both democrats and republicans.